Tuesday, 23 December 2014

Come January 9th,
the Railways Bill is scheduled for its Second Reading in Parliament.
Bristol's MPs should be well-placed to support it – but will they?

The Bill, introduced
by the Greens' Caroline Lucas with formal support from a number of
Labour and Plaid Cymru MPs, has been hyped as renationalising the
railways.

It doesn't do that
though. This Bill is more modest and very much cheaper. It sets out
to bring the passenger train operating franchises, the ones currently
held by Virgin, Stagecoach, First, and a fistful of foreign owned
companies, back into public control.

Instead of buying
these companies out, it waits for the end of each contract, then
awards the new operating contract to a publicly owned company –
thus turning the trains back into a public service instead of the
cash cow they've been for the private operators.

Test bed - East Coast
Main Line

Of course, cash cows
don't always cough up, and when franchisee National Express East
Coast found that they couldn't fulfil their contract and show a
profit, they walked away (very cheaply!) from their expensively
negotiated franchise. To keep the trains running, a public company
East Coast Main Line was created to fill the breach. They filled it
very successfully from 2009 to date, increasing passenger numbers and
revenue, and cutting the net subsidy to a mere 1% (the industry
average is 32%, and a lot of that leaves the country!)

Even so, the current
government has insisted on returning the route to the private sector.

Public Opinion

Very positive. A YouGov survey
shows overall backing of three-to-one; even Tory voters were evenly
divided. It's not unreasonable to think that Bristolians' opinions
won't be much different.

Party policies.

MPs in this
parliament aren't as enthusiastic as the general public, according to
a recent Ipsos-MORI survey
– as you'd expect given the make-up of the House. But in practice,
few parties have a clear-cut policy - just Conservatives who are
ideologically against, while Greens are strongly committed in favour.

SNP have made positive
noises, but where would that leave their funding from Brian Souter of
Stagecoach? LibDem conference agreed that public bodies could enter
the franchise bidding against the private sector – though, as
Christian Wolmar points out,
the franchise bidding system is hugely expensive and wasteful.
Labour, while famously once espousing the common ownership of the
means of production, distribution and exchange, now seems frightened
of any formal endorsement of even having anyone but the private
sector run the country's train services. That's in contrast with
Labour's position in the Welsh Assembly, where
they're looking at setting up a non-profit arms length company to run
the Wales and Borders services, when the franchise enjoyed by Arriva
(Deutsche Bahn) ends in 2018. That's a proposal backed by Plaid
Cymru in the Wesh Assembly, but dismissed by the Welsh Tories as
'Marxist'!

As for UKIP, who knows? Maybe, if he still reads this blog, Mike Frost could tell us?

On January 9th,
the Railways Bill could be killed stone dead, or it could trigger a
sea change in which passenger train services can run primarily for
the benefit of the public. That depends on which MPs can find the
time to be there to vote, and how they balance the pressures from
their party whips, their constituents, and their consciences. We'll
see.

[Added Jan 9:] There was no time for
the second reading today in the House of Commons, so it's been put back
to February 27. Meanwhile, not much enlightenment from local MPs about
their voting intention. Just Kerry McCarthy, who seems to be saying NO
- she wants to keep the franchise bidding market going, but to allow a
publicly owned company to join the bidders. No word from Stephen
Williams, while Dawn Primorolo still pretends her deputy speaker's role
demands that she express no opinion on anything parliamentary!

Saturday, 6 December 2014

Until a couple of weeks ago, Stockwood Pete had never heard of Thomas
Rendle VC, whose bravery a hundred years ago was being honoured at a ceremony in St John's churchyard, Bedminster.

But
I had heard of his younger cousin Ellen who lived just two doors
further down Victoria Place. I actually met her once – and later
married her grandaughter. So reading the family name in the 'Post'
reports gave us both special reason to find out more.

While
Thomas and Ellen were Bristol-born, his father, her mother, and their
five siblings had all been born in mid-Devon, and brought to Bedminster by their
mother when she was prematurely widowed. Other Rendles had already made
the move, part of the mass escape from the market failures and
grinding rural poverty of Victorian England that forced so many to
migrate into the growing industrial cities.

Thomas's
career, through reform school at Kingswood (where he learned his
musicianship) to the army, through South Africa where he met his wife,
and on into the horror of the First World War will be well documented
elsewhere (though I'll add some links at the foot of this piece). Here
I'll stick to a couple of side-stories that have been turned up in the
course of the research, and offer an insight into Bristol around the end
of the Victorian era.

Wiliam Rendle

William Rendle would, had he survived childhood, have been Thomas's uncle. Instead
he was, literally, cut down at the age of ten.

His
widowed mother had remarried in Bedminster when William was just seven.
Her new husband was Richard Davis, blind from birth, who eked out a
living on the streets playing a harmonium – a sort of reed organ.
William was in the habit of being Richard's eyes, helping him – and the
harmonium – around the city.

In the darkness of an
early evening in January 1882, the two of them were making their way
down Captain Carey's Lane, off Old Market Street. You won't find it
now, as it's become part of the Temple Way underpass, but it shows up
very clearly on the excellent “Know Your Place” website.
Captain Carey's Lane was narrow, but it was much used by the carters
who shifted goods to and from the railway goods yard on Midland Road.

That
evening, as the harmonium was being trundled down the lane, William
leading and Richard behind, two horse-drawn carts were making their way
in the opposite direction. There should have been room enough to pass –
but the impatient driver of the second cart attempted to overtake.

It
was never clear whether he had control of his horses, or heard
William's warning shouts, or even saw the child. The cart hit the
harmonium, crushing William against the wall.

The boy
was carried into a neighbouring warehouse and from there to the
Infirmary, but he died within minutes of arriving. The distraught
driver of the cart briefly disappeared from the scene.

At
the inquest, the evidence emerged that many of the rules of cartage
were rarely observed, and that the driver had been all too aware of what
he'd done, though he claimed to know nothing about it till later.

A
verdict of accidental death was returned. Several of the jury remarked
that at present the street was very dangerous as a thoroughfare.
Just another death in Victorian Bristol.
….....................................

Education, Education, Migration

Life was indeed hard for the children of the poor. Thomas Edward Rendle VC, living in Bedminster with three younger sisters and two brothers, had lost his mother in 1898 when he was just 14.

Not long afterwards he was ordered to be detained at the Kingswood Reformatory. Over a century later, S.Glos council is, for some reason, reluctant to release the school records for inspection at the Bristol Record Office, so it's not clear why he was sent there. One thing's for sure; the motherless family was pretty chaotic and its members would have to live on their wits.

His younger sister Lottie was likewise sent to a reformatory school, in distant Exeter. Later she returned to Bristol and married an Exeter man at St Mary Redcliffe in 1908, going on to live back in Exeter and later to emigrate to Canada.

A younger sister, Elizabeth, was brought before the courts in 1899. The record shows that her offence was to be 'found wandering', and the court, in its wisdom, ordered that she be detained for four years at the Carlton House Industrial School for Girls, on St Michaels Hill.

Another sister, Maud, was sent to live with her married aunt's family in Coventry, but in 1904 was sent (along with the two younger brothers) to Canada by the Bristol Emigration Society to a very uncertain future.

All six children, then, were 'rescued' by the social reforms that were all too slowly supplanting the workhouse. The powers of those rescuers, who seemed to have little or no accountability, over the children now seem unbelievable; but they continued for a long time afterwards; even now charities like Fairbridge and Barnados are having to live with the shame of exporting children to the colonies as indentured labour, while knowingly hiding from them the fact they still had parents in Britain.

I wonder if that's what happened to the younger Rendles.

Credits:
Bristol Record Office for the news reports of William Rendle's death, and the Carlton House school registers – and help in using the archive.
Bristol Libraries for free access to Ancestry records. FindmyPast (subscription) for censuses, news searches, and online reprints
General Booth of the Salvation Army for the pictures above – they're details from the frontispiece of his 'Darkest England and the Way Out', published in 1890.
No thanks to South Glos council, who've still not even acknowledged a request for access to the Kingswood Reformatory archive. Why?

About this Blog

This one's from the little known Bristolian outpost of Stockwood, first settled by city expats back in the fifties. Leafy, open, and close to the countryside.... until they grub up the Green Belt and open spaces to build an 'urban extension'.

Written by an adoptive Stockwoodsman, arrived from the wild north-east back in 2004, this blog sets out to look at Stockwood and Bristol issues, mostly from a green perspective